The Essence of Yoga Center

THIS SATURDAY! Join Romi Kalova for a three hour restorative yoga and yoga nidra workshop where you will be invited to rest in the soothing embrace of not only the supportive bolsters and blankets, but also the sweet sound of Romi's voice as she offers yoga nidra and sings with the harmonium. If you haven't signed up yet, now is the time! Graduates of The Essence of Yoga Center receive $10 off the cost of the workshop!

At Last the New Arriving

Like the horn you played in Catholic school
the city will open its mouth and cry

out. "Don't worry 'bout nothing. Don't mean
no thing." It will leave you stunned

as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut
who's told he won the whole damn purse.

It will feel better than any floor
that's risen up to meet you. It will rise

like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother's hands. She'll come back,

heaven having been too far from home
to hold her. O it will be beautiful.

Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys
won't kill you for it. Shake your head.

Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize
you are. What a lucky sack of stars.

- Gabrielle Calvocoressi
📸 Khamkéo Vilaysing

If you love Romi's Winter Solstice Workshop, then now is the time to reserve your spot for Savor the Light - Restorative Yoga and Yoga Nidra Workshop on June 22nd from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. During this restful and rejuvenative workshop, Romi will guide you to settle fully into the support of bolsters, blankets and other props so that the body, mind and spirit may gently let go of anything that's not needed. Through yoga nidra and the sweet sounds of Romi's voice and the harmonium, we will celebrate the fullness of the seasonal moment and highlight the spirit of fullness, wholeness and culmination. Limited space in studio, so sign up today!

These Poems

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

- June Jordan
📸 Alan Labisch

A Lesson On Love

My dog and I do not speak the same language.
Yet every day, she tells me:
'I trust you to know when I need to go for a walk.
I will let you hold me when you need to
and I will ask you for love when I need it.
On the days you are sick, I will lie beside you.
I will look for you in rooms when you are not here,
and I will greet you with so much joy
when you come home.
I will guard you when you sleep.
I will wag my tail and let you know
that everything will be okay
on your bad days,
and I know that you will do
the same on mine.'

And from this I learn that my dog
and I actually do speak the same language.

After all, the universe is a kindly ancient thing.
It gave love as a mother tongue to every living being.

- Nikita Gill
📸 paje victoria

What Begins

What begins in beauty, ends in beauty.
What begins in sorrow, ends in sorrow.
The seed once planted, soon in full bloom.
If grief, then grief. If anger, anger. They say
the first week of any love affair reveals its end.
'Give me the child at seven,' and so forth.
And didn't the world begin with a bang?
Hard to argue for another truth. But I have seen
a heart worn thin, take to small repairs, have watched
a blue jay, born wild, eat out of a woman's hand.
And didn't we begin as tadpoles, curled and gilled?
I want to think the starting place is only
one location on a curve that we can follow
to another end. And then, begin again.

- Danusha Lameris
📸 Timothy D***s

Peonies

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open--
pools of lace,
white and pink--
and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities--
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again--
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

- Mary Oliver
📸 eleni koureas

Savasana

On the bonsai-green carpet, you stretch
your frame out flat upon a blue yoga mat,

and parallel, I lie down upon a purple one,
both of us becoming still, our bodies sinking

further into the floor with each slow, steady
breath. It's night, and together we're letting go.

Mollie, our old black lab mix, wanders in, licks
your open palm, sniffs my hair, snuffles, settles

by my head with labored breath. Soon, I know,
we'll lose her. Someday, each other. This is

practice. We're learning to dissolve, surrender
to earth, release thighs, hips, neck, skull, all

the bones, pay attention only to breath--let it
become a ribbon, the texture of fine silk.

- Marianne Murphy Zarzana

Giving Notice

One day soon, you'll rise from your desk or quietly excuse yourself
from the meeting or turn the car around in the middle of the street.
Anything might trigger it. An open window. A sunny day in April.
Daffodils panting in a mason jar. Call it madness. Call it glorious

disappearance. Call it locomotion. Do what you should have done
years ago. Let your body out to pasture. Fill your calendar with nothing
but sky. Surrender to the woods. To cicadas and sap beetles. To the moths,
the color of memory and dream. Wear dusk like an ancient cloak. Hurry--

there's still time to creature--to pluck all the wild cloudberries and carry
them home. Even now, you can hear coyotes crying at the canyon's edge.
Grow back your hackles and howl. This was always your first chorus,
the mother tongue, a feral hymn you know by heart.

- J. Sullivan
📸 Wolfgang Hasselmann

Group yoga classes that not only get your body moving, but also move your spirit. Join us in May for a class! All classes are offered both in person and online via zoom, and all classes are eligible for our 'Pay from the Heart' option. 💜

April Morning

You are living the life
you wanted as if you'd known
what that was but of course
you didn't so you'd groped
toward it feeling for what
you couldn't imagine, what
your hands couldn't tell you,
for what that shape could be.

This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window
is slightly open and there is the vaguest
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps
between the buildings because it's spring
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.

- Jonathan Wells
📸 Suhyeon Choi

This Spring

How can I love this spring
when it's pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it's trying,
once again, to save me.

- James Pearson
📸 Ellaina Horton

Physical Therapy

Ask, first, what your smallest
body parts require to sing again:
coconut oil for your hair’s
dry ends, camphor for the
earlobes, rosehip kneaded into
fingertips with fingertips.
Grapeseed will feed most
hungers of the skin. But
if even your bones cry
January, dip your sharpest
knife in a jar of raw honey.
Lather it on your thighs,
making circles, making certain
not to confuse this ache for that
other, the one that keeps
pulling you to the earth, the one
question you still can’t say out loud.
Recite instead the names of trees:
sumac, sweet birch, slippery elm.
Take your palm to the wild place
under your chin and count:
vein, artery, chokecherry,
weeping willow, until your
xacto knife pulse slows, holds. Let
your mouth fill with gold, almonds,
zinneas. Then: soften.

- Franny Choi
📸 Joshua J. Cotten

Under Ideal Conditions

say in the flattest part of North Dakota
on a starless moonless night
no breath of wind

a man could light a candle
then walk away
every now and then
he could turn and see
the candle burning

seventeen miles later
provided conditions remained ideal
he could still see the flame

somewhere between the seventeenth and eighteenth mile
he would lose the light

if he were walking backwards
he would know the exact moment
when he lost the flame

he could step forward and find it again
back and forth
dark to light light to dark

what's the place where the light disappears?
where the light reappears?
don't tell me about photons
and eyeballs
reflection and refraction
don't tell me about one hundred and eighty-six thousand
miles per second and the theory of relativity

all I know is that place
where the light appears and disappears
that's the place where we live

- Al Zolynas
📸 Karsten Winegeart

Spring Renewal at The Essence of Yoga Center! Join us for a therapeutic group yoga class on Mondays or Wednesdays! All classes eligible for the 'pay from the heart' option, and all classes offered both in person and online via zoom.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a first, I'll take it all.

- Ada Limón
📸 Jenny Cvek

eschatology

i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver
and they say it back—

when someone holds the door open for you
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—

walking my dog, i used to see this older man
and whenever I said good morning,
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—

in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether.

when the clerk says how are you
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’

i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot.
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + intellajet’

i mean when we do go careening into the sun,

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car,
right now! it’d just take a second—

and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat,
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.

but I won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star

- Eve L. Ewing
📸 Liza Azorina

In that first hardly noticed moment
in which you wake, coming back to this life
from the other more secret, movable and
frighteningly honest world where everything
began, there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make
plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible while carrying
what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting lights of the
morning window toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and
spread its branches against a future sky?

- David Whyte
📸 Mila Albrecht

Spring is springing! Join us for a group yoga class in March! All group classes are eligible for the 'pay from the heart' option, which means you can enjoy a yoga class with us for as little as $5.

Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

- Mary Oliver
📸 Veronika Nakhtman

My Father at the Piano

When he still had the Bechstein he turned the seat and instrument
to the French windows, so if he looked up in reverie he saw the garden,
grass springing through crazy-paving meant to suppress it, where roses
survived and sometimes sweet pea climbed the opposing fence,
and up the rise a disused railway line became a path for hikers.

But I think his reverie was always with the music: notes and values,
composer’s markings, meaning found in minims and semibreves spoken
by his soft unworkmanlike hands. He could be carried off, taken away,
transported outside himself–his tentative, make-do self, his failed
marriage, broken family, and later this life with an ailing mother–

into a paradise of logic and beauty untouched by foibles or decay.
The Bechstein had a soft tone and easy action; his dad had bought it
second-hand in the twenties, already mellowed by generations,
so now a light touch made a velvet pianissimo, and children
perched there for lessons felt in their small hands power enough.

The time he spent with it! Meticulous, joyful work, dissecting problems,
attending to the technical: tone, dynamics, color, phrasing. I saw
this was practice, absorbing the whole being, mind, heart, limbs.
Forgetting self in pursuit of the real, the incorruptible. Which
was not to say perfection, but readiness. To receive the something,

to be there the moment the something happened.

- Mary O’Connor
📸 Cara Sparkman

Allow

There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. Dam a
stream, and it will create a new
channel. Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to higher ground. The only
safety lies in letting it all in–
the wild with the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.

- Danna Faulds
📸 Dan Grinwis

Have you enrolled yet for our 37 hour continuing education course? The Path of Gentle Soul Restorative Yoga Teacher Training is a unique opportunity to invest in yourself and your well-being. Learn more and enroll at the link!

Restorative Yoga Teacher Training — The Essence of Yoga Center Our turbulent times call for utmost gentleness, and the practice of Restorative Yoga is the ultimate act of gentleness, tenderness and compassion toward ourselves, our communities, and the world. This training for certified yoga teachers seeks to develop an understanding of the principles of Restora...

INTRODUCING! A new Pay from the Heart option for all group classes at The Essence of Yoga Center. Attend any group class anytime at the amount that fits your budget. On our Class Registration page, simply click "Pay from the Heart" and select your desired contribution--$5, $10, $15 or $20. Anytime. Any class. For any reason. Visit https://theessenceofyogacenter.com/class-registration to register for class today!

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
- Derek Walcott
📸 Inga Gezalian

Conscious deep relaxation is essential to our health and well-being. Restorative yoga provides not only a framework for deep rest, but also an opportunity to fine tune our interoceptive sense--our capacity for deep listening. This ability to perceive the state of our internal landscape allows us to better respond to the needs of our body-mind-spirit, to build self-trust, self-confidence and self-esteem, and to more fully experience and enjoy our lives.

If you're interested in exploring these skills and adding new tools to your yoga toolbox, consider joining The Path of Gentle Soul Restorative Yoga Teacher Training, beginning this spring at The Essence of Yoga Center with Romana Kalova and Cara L. D. Sparkman. Visit our website today to learn more and enroll: www.theessenceofyogacenter.com

What an amazing week! Sun, sand, waves, good food, new friends, old friends, and of course...yoga.

Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade
pulled not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has--
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses--as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.

- Holly J. Hughes
📸 Connie Kirby

Dreaming of sun, sand and ocean waves? Join us for our weeklong yoga retreat in Mexico! Taking place February 3rd through 10th, 2024 in beautiful Puerto Morelos, Mexico, this retreat offers the opportunity...
- to make real and lasting shifts in habitual postural patterns
- to explore our naturally arising asymmetries
- to enjoy daily meditation and uncover the innate sense of well-being available to us in every moment
- to let our bodies remember the graceful ease of functional movement and the essential breath

Daily yoga classes, gourmet vegetarian meals and world class accommodations are waiting for you on this deeply rejuvenative yoga adventure. Join Cara L. D. Sparkman and Karen DiGirolamo and let yourself be nourished by the vibrant surroundings and deeply supportive yogic practices. Visit our website or message us to learn more!

After Jack Sends Me the Definition of Black Hole

A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so
strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light
—can escape from it.
—Wikipedia

Perhaps black hole is just another word
for God—a force that pulls in everything,
regardless of how that everything looks or prays or votes.
A cup that runneth—not over, but ever in. A shepherd
so adept at shepherding that nothing—
no sheep, no man, no star, no dust—
could ever be lost in its spacetime pasture.
It creates communion, obliterates separateness.
In pictures, it’s a vision of still water.
In truth, it’s unable to be known.
A force that overwhelms all other forces.
It devours some, and in others spurs growth.

And what isn’t, I suppose, another word
for God: Ledger. Valley. Garden. Death.
Rhubarb. Rod. Human. Staff.
There is this gift to see the divine in everything.
There is this force that pulls the everything in.
Every particle. Every everything. Even (my god) the light.

- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
📸 Ryan Hutton